HEADS to bridge India’s mental healthcare gap with AI

India faces a substantial mental healthcare gap, with only about one in five affected individuals receiving timely, appropriate care. To tackle this issue, NIMHANS, the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and the Lokopriya Gopinath Bordoloi Regional Institute of Mental Health in Tezpur will launch a collaborative project called 'HEADS' (Human-in-the-loop Evaluation of Assisted Depression Screening) on Thursday.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, this two-year study aims to develop and evaluate AI-assisted approaches for early identification and screening of depression. Lekhansh Shukla, assistant professor of psychiatry at NIMHANS and principal investigator of the project, emphasized that existing digital health innovations often fail to be effective in diverse, non-English clinical settings due to their reliance on English-language, urban datasets.

HEADS will build AI tools from day one to understand clinical conversations in Kannada, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, and English. A key aspect of the project is a 'human-in-the-loop' framework, ensuring AI tools function as supportive clinical decision-aids to help clinicians recognize symptoms earlier without replacing professional clinical judgment.

Over the 24-month project duration, researchers will record and analyze approximately 4,500 clinical interviews across healthcare sites in NIMHANS and LGBRIMH. Additionally, the study will involve a 15-member panel of Lived Experience Experts, who will actively shape the study's design, inform consent protocols, audit AI algorithms for bias and stigmatizing language, and stress-test systems before deployment.